Galette v. New Jersey Transit Corp. · ¶27

This Court first applied this idea of corporate personhood to the arm-of-the-State inquiry in Bank of United States v. Planters' Bank of Ga., 9 Wheat. 904 (1824). It held that a state-chartered bank was not an arm of Georgia because it was a “corporation” and “the judgment” would “be satisfied by the property of the corporation, not by that of the individual corporators.” Id., at 907. Chief Justice Marshall explained that the “State of Georgia, by giving to the Bank the capacity to sue and be sued, voluntarily strips itself of its sovereign character, so far as respects the transactions of the Bank, and waives all the privileges of that character.” Id., at 907–908. Subsequent cases reaffirmed Planters' Bank's holding, relying on the corporate status of other state-chartered banks to deny them sovereign immunity. That was true even when the State exerted significant control over the…

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